Examining disabled students' experiences of learning and labor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Scholars of disability studies have theorized education as a capitalist project that serves to sort workers into the categories of able and disabled, and consequently into different class statuses. However, there is little extant research that uses qualitative methods to trace how this sorting happens on an everyday basis for disabled students in higher education, particularly for disabled graduate students. This dissertation fills this gap by using qualitative methods to document the experiences of disabled students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), examining how writing, the accommodation process, labor, and time contribute to their lived experiences of disability. This project also considers these students’ experiences as workers with economic motives and facing economic pressures. Ultimately, this materialist disability studies project brings together scholarship from disability studies, writing studies, and critical university studies to argue that, within higher education, disability, writing, and the political economy of the university cannot be understood independently—we must examine all three together to understand any individual part. Further, I show how my participants experienced disability primarily through misfitting with the socially necessary labor-time of the university as defined by normative structures like program timelines, academic calendars, and course syllabi. By tracing the accommodation process at UIUC, I argue that the documentation it generates serves to record the university’s purported accessibility while concealing the strategic inaccessibilities that define disabled student/workers’ everyday lives at UIUC. After highlighting the ever-escalating overwork of universities, the unsolvable contradictions of the classroom, and the perpetual labor of reverse accommodation that disabled student/workers must engage in, I argue that challenging ableism will require challenging capitalism itself and organizing based on shared class consciousness, across identity groups and job categories.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Owens, Lesley Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Beauchamp, Toby
• Gallagher, John
• Mortensen, Peter
• Russell, Lindsay R.

• Disability
• Accessibility
• Higher Education
• Writing
• Graduate School
• Labor
• Disability Studies
• Writing Studies
• Critical University Studies

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Lesley Owens

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129888

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129888